In application server and other enterprise computing environments, a common task for an administrator is the need to patch a series of application server installations supporting one or more domains. For a patching (e.g., Zero Downtime Patching, ZDT) application update rollout, the upgrade may contain incompatible, in terms of Java serialization, changes in a stateful EJB's (Enterprise Java Bean) state compared to the version of the bean before the upgrade. While the system is rolling out the application upgrade to servers in a cluster, state may be replicated from one server to the next. When a stateful EJB's state is replicated from a patched server to an unpatched server (or vice-versa), the state to be deserialized on the primary server may not be able to be deserialized on the secondary server if either of those servers have already been patched, but the other has not.